Community awareness management companies (CAMCs) provide community awareness programs (CAPs) (also referred to as public awareness programs) for businesses and other entities, such as the pipeline industry. A CAMC manages various facets of CAPs, including, for example, direct mail campaigns designed to educate various audiences about the business or other entity, the environment, and other information. In an example of a pipeline company, the CAMC educates various audiences about the pipeline company and pipeline operations. The CAMC may include other or different information for other entities or other pipeline programs.
Audiences for a particular CAP may include residents, businesses, emergency management persons or groups, excavators, or other audiences. The CAMC generally identifies stakeholder audiences for a particular CAP and other contacts to which information will be sent. A stakeholder audience includes those audience members that have a stake in education or other awareness programs, such as residents and business that may be interested in a company's business, its operations, or other issues.
When managing a CAP for a pipeline company, for example, CAMCs may analyze pipeline data, identify the stakeholder audience for the pipeline CAP, establish mailing lists designed for the specific stakeholder audiences and/or specific companies or other contacts, and design, print, and execute mailings. One or more of the foregoing may be included in a package referred to as an audit package. Upon program completion, the CAMC may provide the client with, for example, an audit package having a map of a pipeline area in which areas of mailings are designated, paper and compact disk (CD) copies of the mailing lists, and a form documenting acceptance and delivery by the Post Office of a mailing and the number of pieces in the mailing. In other CAPs, other items may be included in an audit package. Since these audit packages generally are paper, they require a significant amount of storage.
The CAMC works with client companies to understand their centerline data. Centerline data generally identifies the centerline or physical location of a structural item of relevance to the CAP for a geographic area. In the pipeline CAP example, the centerline data is used to show the centerline of pipeline locations in one or more geographic areas.
Using the centerline data for one example, the CAMC generates a paper map and a paper report to identify data managed by the CAP, such as applicable pipelines or other data. The paper report may identify, for example, a table of audience members within a geographic location for the CAP.
The CAMC defines a buffer area, which generally is a number of feet or miles from the centerline data. Audiences within the buffer area are identified, and the buffer area and the audiences in the buffer area typically are identified in the audit package. In the pipeline CAP example, the buffer area is defined for a distance from the pipeline centerline data, and a pipeline analysis with the identifications of audiences within the buffer area is generated for an audit package.
The CAMC may generate one or more audit packages for a client in a program year. A program year is 365 days (not including a leap year) during which a CAP operates.
A dataset is a collection of data that relates to a topic or thing. Generally, the dataset has data attributes that describe the collection of data. The data attributes are related to each other and related to the topic or thing of the dataset. For example, a business dataset for a pipeline may contain a set of attributes for the land on which the pipeline is located or for pipeline statistics.
A company and/or a CAMC may have different datasets of information related to the CAP. However, the datasets are difficult to manage.
It would be helpful to have geographic information, such as maps, for the CAP. Geographic information system (GIS) products provide geographic information, such as maps or other geographic data, based on some input. With most GIS products, if you want to relate data from multiple disparate datasets to geographic data you must permanently merge the data from the disparate datasets with the geographic data. However, this generally requires that the data be replicated. In some cases, the data may require conversion prior to replication. Other GIS products provide the ability to join or associate one or more datasets with geographic data, but only as long as the datasets are in the same database in which the geographic data is housed.
Improved systems and methods are needed to geographically identify aspects of a CAP and to enable entry and management of audience data, including entering and identifying audience members geographically, throughout a program year. Thus, new systems and methods are needed to enable linking different datasets in a community awareness management system with spatial data without replicating the datasets and to enable a user to access the datasets spatially.